Build Alexa Voice Bot with Node.js for Restaurant Reservation Use Case

"Alexa, I want to make a reservation!"

How many of you are planning to make your hands dirty on the Alexa world? Curious to know how a voice bot can be build using Amazon Alexa and Node.js application? This blog is the right place for you. Let's start.

Part 1:

First you need to identify the use case. Here we are dealing with a voice based restaurant reservation system. When a person says to Alexa that he wants to make a restaurant reservation, basically he is showing the intent to make a reservation. Also the reservation will have few slots like date of reservation, time, city etc. These are called slots. Once you identify the intents and slots for your use case, design the voice bot in Amazon Alexa Skill Kit (ASK) first. In ASK you need to define the intents, utterances, slots.

Watch this video to know on how to design the Alexa Skills in ASK.

The json file for the Alexa skill can be found here from GitHub. You can also import the json file into the ASK dashboard to check the details of the intents and slots.

Part 2:

 In this part we will learn how to write the Node.js application and deal with the intents and slots send from Alexa. For this we will use Node.js package alexa-app-server.

 You can find the detailed code from GitHub here.

Part 3:

Finally, once the code development is competed, you need to publish the Alexa skill for beta testing. This phase will allow to test your skill from Alexa mobile app or any Alexa device (like echo).

Happy coding!